If the Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository sounds familiar but is not something that you have accessed recently, it may be a good time to return for another look as this freely-available online resource has evolved quite a bit throughout its history. First conceived of in 1979, it began its presence on the Internet in 1995 and had several re-designs over the years as the Virginia Henderson International Nursing Library (1). Re-named the Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository in 2013, it was further transformed into the “open-access, full-text academic and clinical repository” that its developers continue to improve and upgrade even today.

From their website:

“The Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository (Henderson Repository) is the only repository solely dedicated to sharing works created by nurses. It is an open-access digital academic and clinical scholarship service that freely collects, preserves, and disseminates full-text nursing research and evidence-based practice materials. The repository is a resource of the honor society of nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

All nurses are invited to submit research-related or evidence-based practice works. These works may be authored by a single nurse, multiple nurses, or a collaborative group that includes a nurse. There is no fee to submit, and authors retain copyright to their materials, maintaining control of their work via a self-archiving mechanism.”

The Henderson Repository is a particularly good option for nurses interested in sharing their scholarship since it contains file/document types beyond published articles, including conference presentations, and accepts content from nurses of all degree levels and affiliations. Because it extends beyond the typical content found in commercial publications, this resource has been used as a grey literature source in systematic reviews publications (2, 3). With both basic and advanced search functionality, as well as, extensive browsing options, including by Author, Level of Evidence, and CINAHL Subject Headings, the Henderson Repository interface accommodates both novice and expert searchers.

(1) “Virginia Henderson International Nursing Library” Journal of the Medical Library Association vol. 94,3 (2006): 360–361.

(2) Burns T, Fernandez R, Stephens M. The experiences of adults who are on dialysis and waiting for a renal transplant from a deceased donor: a systematic review. JBI Database System Rev Implement Rep. 2015 Mar 12;13(2):169-211.

(3) Butler M, Collins R, Drennan J, Halligan P, O’Mathúna DP, Schultz TJ, Sheridan A, Vilis E. Hospital nurse staffing models and patient and staff-related outcomes. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2011 Jul 6;(7):CD007019.

For more information on this or other MSK Library resources, feel free to Ask Us!

The Open Access (OA) movement has resulted in millions of scholarly papers becoming freely-available to readers around the World. An often overlooked consequence of this phenomenon is the fact that the images included in a journal article generally also fall under the same licenses that dictate the re-use options for the entire publication.

With the increase in open source literature, having a specialized search engine that can help researchers identify needed OA biomedical images can be extremely helpful. The National Library of Medicine has created just that with its Open-i ^® service.

From their website:

“Open-i service of the National Library of Medicine enables search and retrieval of abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections. Searching may be done using text queries as well as query images. Open-i provides access to over 3.7 million images from about 1.2 million PubMed Central^® articles; 7,470 chest x-rays with 3,955 radiology reports; 67,517 images from NLM History of Medicine collection; and 2,064 orthopedic illustrations.”

The available limits that can be applied to refine the search results are quite comprehensive. Limit options include: Article type, Image type/diagnostic imaging modality, Collection/source, License type, Specialty, among other things, and the records can also be field-searched or ranked by research question type (treatment, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, genetics, etc).

Further reading:

• Demner-Fushman, D., Antani, S., Simpson, M., & Thoma, G. R. (2012). Design and development of a multimodal biomedical information retrieval system. Journal of Computing Science and Engineering, 6(2), 168-177.
• Technical Report (September 2010): Combining Text and Visual Features for Biomedical Information Retrieval

Nature Index is a resource available from Springer Nature (since 2016) that uses data science and bibliometrics to generate indicators and rankings reflecting research output.

From this paper: A guide to the Nature Index. Nature. 2018 Sep;561(7723):S37. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-06628-2. PubMed PMID: 30232441.

“The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relation­ships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in 82 high-quality natural science journals, chosen by an inde­pendent group of researchers.

The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of publication productivity at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made avail­able under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Springer Nature.”

According to the publisher, the list of included journals (revised in June 2018) was generated by a ”global survey of the wider research community” and via a multidisciplinary panel of researchers who were asked to name the journals that they would most like to publish their best work in, without considering impact factor. (In a way, this concept is not too different from having a stock market index act like a benchmark or indicator of the performance of broader markets.)

Users can view an institution’s individual profile (for example, MSKCC’s profile) that includes information about research output, collaborations and relationships. Also available are supplements based on in-house analyses of the Nature Index data, for example, the Nature Index 2018 Rising Stars supplement recently released in September 2018. These supplements include a variety of interesting Tables, for example, one from this latest supplement focusses on “rising” institutions. Furthermore, on their main website a permanent menu option leads to various annual tables (going back to 2016), for example, ones listing the top healthcare institutions for specified years.

Thanks to Nature Index’s Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) which allows for the most recent 12 months of data to be freely re-used by others, individuals may register with natureindex.com to create customized tables around their own interests.  In fact, it appears that the data has already been used by researchers, for example, to carry out the work reported on in this published study on “Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals”, see:

Bendels MHK, Müller R, Brueggmann D, Groneberg DA. Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals. PLoS One. 2018 Jan 2;13(1):e0189136. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189136. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID: 29293499; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5749692.

Fell free to contact the MSK Library with any questions about this or any other information resources.